Julia Peyton-Jones, the prestigious co-director who raised visitor numbers to the Serpentine gallery by hundreds of thousands and famously hosted Tilda Swinton asleep in Cornelia Parker’s glass box, is to step down from the organisation after 25 years.

“There is never a good time to leave – however, I wanted to go when the Serpentine was firing on all cylinders and our major capital projects had been completed,” Peyton-Jones told the Guardian. “I felt after 25 years this was a good time to hand over the reins to someone new.”

Peyton-Jones joined the gallery in 1991 and was sole director for 15 years until she was joined by Hans Ulrich Obrist as co-director in 2006. The pair’s ethos for the gallery was “to think the unthinkable”.

Under her watch, the Hyde Park gallery has hosted works by Damien Hirst, Ai Weiwei, Yoko Ono, Gerhard Richter and Jeff Koons. In 1995, Tilda Swinton famously slept in a glass box at the gallery as part of Cornelia Parker’s performance piece, The Maybe.

Since 2000, she has also commissioned some of the world’s most sought-after architects to design a temporary pavilion for the gallery each year, which has become a highly popular annual attraction, drawing thousands of visitors to the park.

Since she moved from the Hayward to the Serpentine, Peyton-Jones, 63, has overseen an expansion of the gallery, both in terms of space and influence. In 1998 the gallery underwent a £4m renovation and then in 2013 the opening of the Serpentine Sackler, an extra gallery space renovated from an 1850s artillery store just minutes from the main Serpentine building at the cost of £14.5m. It has also become the sixth most visited gallery in London.

Peyton-Jones said her proudest achievement as director had been to maintain free admission to the gallery, through the difficult arts climate of the past decade, as well as “presenting challenging contemporary art to a very wide audience”. The high-profile exhibitions and popularity of the summer pavilions has ensured visitor numbers have gone from 250,000 to 1.2 million a year during her 25 years in charge.

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Peyton-Jones also paid tribute to Obrist, and said working alongside him for the past 10 years had been “an incredible privilege”. She would not comment on whether he would be continuing as the sole director of the Serpentine, or whether they would appoint her a successor.

Peyton-Jones will step down from the role next summer, after which she plans to work independently in contemporary art and architecture, and embark on new projects.

Speaking about how the art world had changed over her time at the helm of the Serpentine, Peyton-Jones said: “I suppose the biggest change is that the art world has become truly international. We are now just as likely to be working with artists and architects from Asia, Africa and Latin America as those from Europe and the UK. It is a very exciting development.”